With the growth of computer networks, electronic mail (shortly referred to as e-mail) has become an extremely popular interpersonal communication media, for both private and professional purposes. In particular, thanks to the impressive diffusion of the Internet in the past few years, Internet e-mail nowadays provides a standard communication mechanism for millions of computer users.
By means of any one of the several e-mail client softwares, such as IBM Lotusnotes, Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, and Eudora, just to cite some, composing and sending an e-mail message is a rather simple task, that involves specifying the e-mail address or addresses of one or more intended recipients of the message in one or more recipient address fields (the conventional “To”, “Cc” and “Bcc” fields) of a message composition window, editing if desired a message subject field, editing a message body and, possibly, attaching one or more files to the message. In particular, compiling the recipient address fields is made easier by address book utilities, which allow creating user-defined address books wherein the user can save e-mail addresses for subsequent retrieval. These utilities also allows the user creating mailing lists or groups of recipients, including two or more e-mail addresses of recipients which are normally jointly included by the user in the list of recipients: when the user desires to send an e-mail message to the recipients of a given mailing list, he/she does not need to individually select each recipient from the address book, being sufficient to select the respective mailing list.
It frequently happens that, after having composed and sent an e-mail message to one or more recipients, the message sender realizes that the message, as such, should not have been sent. For example, by reviewing a copy of the sent message stored in a repository of sent messages, the message sender may notice that the message body contained some errors or was incomplete, or that one or more of the intended attachments were missing, or that the message was sent to the wrong recipient or recipients.
Situations like these cannot be remedied and are, at best, highly disappointing for both the message sender and the message recipients, not to say potentially dangerous. From one hand, the message sender has to inform the recipients of the erroneous message that the message they received contained errors, and possibly provide the correct information; this may be done by sending an additional e-mail message, by phone, or personally. From the other hand, the recipients of the erroneous message, if not informed properly and timely of the errors contained therein, waste time reading the incorrect message; they may even be lead astray by the erroneous information contained in the incorrect message, and, possibly, they may undertake undesired actions.
It is observed that the problem of sending erroneous messages, albeit probably not exclusively inherent to e-mail systems, is however exacerbated by the quickness of the process of compiling and sending e-mail messages.